Monday, November 10, 2014

My Best Birthday Present

I haven't had a birthday party in fifty years. Sure, when
you're a kid it's exciting to add a year to your age, have your parents gather
your friends, blow out the candles, and get presents, but today I turn 63 and I don't feel much like blowing out
a fire. Nothing very special about November 10th other than it is the day that
Stanley found Livingston. Okay, I wouldn't mind a present or two, but that's
more a matter of actually needing stuff than thinking I deserve any sort of
reward just for having survived another year. I've always felt it was a wee bit
egomaniacal to throw yourself a big birthday party. Nothing wrong with
celebrating others, but when it comes to celebrating yourself, it shouldn't be
in public.

Many
decades ago today it was also my birthday and, as normal, I was doing what I
always do, what I still do, what I'm doing right now, writing at my computer, when there
was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was Timothy Leary who said
"Hi, I'm your birthday present." He wouldn't explain how or why this
came to be, or who in particular was bestowing him upon me. He was simply
there, and he would hang out for at least an hour. All he would tell me was
that he was told I was someone he should meet.

Whenever
you meet someone famous in a personal situation, it's hard to know how to
behave, particularly if they're enormous media stars. After all, you've spent
hours gazing at them, thinking about them, perhaps days or weeks staring at
their image. Imagine the hundreds of hours you've spent with certain stars
broadcast regularly into your living room. They feel like a friend, like you
actually know them. They're not and you don't, but it's a hard feeling to shake
when they're standing right in front of you, coming into your house, sitting on
your sofa, checking the place out while waiting for you to bring them a drink.
No matter how many memories you have of them, they have none of you. To them,
you are a total stranger. Act like a fan and you risk becoming
part of their teeming crowd of lookie loos. Treat them like you don't know who they
are and they could get insulted. No way to make a friend. Friendships deserve
an even playing field, so it's hard to think of yourself as the friend of a
celebrity until they know as much about you as you know about them. Which is
why celebrities are SO interested when you interrupt them somewhere in public
and tell them about your uncle Sid's gall bladder operation.

I
wanted to be friends with Timothy Leary so he had a hell of a lot of catching
up to do because he knew nothing about me and I knew a lot about him, or at
least I thought I did. I shifted into show-and-tell mode, whipping out a
book of Polaroids for him to peruse. He enjoyed my madness immensely
and demanded I loan him the book which he promised to return.

I proceeded to tell him something I'm sure he heard a million times. My
life was profoundly changed by his research into psychedelia, combined with
reading Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test, the Beatles, and meeting a guy named Mario in 1970 who claimed
to be the husband of the actual Alice that Arlo Guthrie sang about but who
supported his acting habit by selling acid at Lee Strasberg's studio where I
happened to be studying at the time.

But
I digress. The first and foremost influence that Timothy Leary had upon me was
my art, which simply didn't exist. Before my first acid trip, I was an actor but not an
artist. I had never played guitar, had certainly never created any
impressionism, and hadn't written a single word other than school assignments.
Maybe I would have discovered these talents on my own, but if my Polaroids
remind you of acid flashbacks, welcome to the club. On acid, what I do to my
Polaroids, you can do to reality. Move it around a little. Make big things look
small, small things look big, marvel at the infinite depths you're capable of
perceiving, as though reality were a 3D comic book and for the first time you
were looking at it with the red-and-blue glasses.

Pre-acid,
I was only interested in being an actor, moving to New York to study with Lee
Strasberg, and getting in a Broadway play. On acid, I actually attempted to
give a performance from Spoon River
Anthology in front of the man himself, a performance he declared
"interesting," a performance that convinced me that acting was a very
strange profession. While personally communicating with the infinite miracles
of the universe, I had an extremely hard time convincing myself that the most
important thing I could be doing was pretending to be a fictional character
while reciting dialogue written by a writer I'd never met. Post-acid I walked
home from the Village to my boarding house at 39th and Park, picked up my
roommate's guitar and started playing. It wasn't long before I was a better
guitar player than actor, and I ended up composing music for several
off-Broadway shows. Way off Broadway. The
Company Theater at La Cienega and Pico in Los Angeles to be precise.

Other
acid trips were less eventful and I stopped taking it, but not before playing
with my first SX-70 Polaroid camera and discovering I didn't need acid to
change reality to my own specifications.

We
talked and talked. He wasn't a drug addled guru and I wasn't an acid burnout.
He was extremely intelligent, certainly one of the smartest people I ever met. My vision of Leary had been fogged by his media
image, and I had forgotten that he was a Harvard professor. Luckily, some
others forgot too and that's how he escaped from prison. The most amazing story
he told me was this one...

When
he was busted by the Feds for possession of one single joint of pot and
sentenced to 20 years in a Federal penitentiary, the prison officials did what
they always did with new prisoners, they gave him a psychological test to
determine whether he would go to a minimum or maximum security prison. He
passed the test with flying colors and was sent to minimum security where he
promptly escaped. What the officials didn't know was that Leary himself wrote
the psychological test for the Federal prison system when still at Harvard, so
he knew exactly what answers to give.

After
an hour or so, my birthday present had to leave, but in his new life as
Hollywood gadfly I kept running into him over the years at video shows and art
galleries. I'm glad he lived long enough to experience the Internet, I'm glad I got my Polaroid portfolio back five years after his death when it was found among his belongings, and I hope some day to be someone else's birthday present.